Site Mobile Navigation

No Utopia, but to Workers It's a Job

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

In the four years since a shuttered General Motors Corporation factory here re-opened as a joint venture with the Toyota Motors Corporation, the resurrected assembly plant has been hailed as proof that a labor and management utopia could be created in American heavy industry.

Indeed, with its extraordinarily high productivity and extraordinarily low level of defects and absenteeism, the car plant seemed like a management dream come true. Union leaders and labor experts pointed to the same statistics as proof that giving workers, even union workers, a bigger say in how they performed their jobs results in satisfied, more productive employees. And both sides pointed to the Toyota-run plant as proof that with the right organizational system, American factories could take on anybody in the world.

But in recent months, a controversy has surrounded the plant. The notion that New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or Nummi, as the joint venture is widely known, is any sort of worker paradise has been separately attacked by dissident union officials and by Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, two former auto workers who wrote a book, ''Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept.'' Quite the contrary, they contend, the plant is more like a worker hell - and one, they predict, that hordes of other American workers will get a taste of in the 1990's as manufacturers in this country struggle to compete with such formidable rivals as the Japanese and the Koreans.

Not so, say leaders of the United Automobile Workers union, which represents Nummi's 2,000 production workers. One of them - Bruce Lee, the director of the United Automobile Workers' western region who helped create Nummi - dismisses the critics of the Nummi work system as ''a few old-guard unionists who are uncomfortable with the idea of sharing responsibility with management'' and ''a handful of 1960's-era leftists.''

While acknowledging that Nummi has a brisk work pace, Mr. Lee and other union leaders vehemently deny that it is ''management by stress'' as its critics make it out to be. They also take issue with the charge that the work teams at Nummi are a management device to substitute peer pressure to perform for traditional supervision. The Nummi team system is liberating workers by giving them unprecedented control over their jobs, and it is ''increasing the plant's productivity and competitiveness while making jobs easier,'' Mr. Lee said.

But clearly a significant minority of U.A.W. members at Nummi and elsewhere are not buying this line.

One is Jerry Tucker, a dissident who bucked the union's establishment to win a seat on its governing board. Mr. Tucker, who is now campaigning for re-election in a district that includes parts of the Middle West and Southwest, drew a roar of approval at a Detroit-area union meeting when he denounced the self-management team method because, he said, it ''frictionalizes workers against each other to increase productivity and eliminate workers.''

Dissent is evident at Nummi as well. A group opposing the local union leadership, calling itself the People's Caucus, won two of seven seats on the local's governing board and some lower-ranking positions in elections last summer. Robert Fernandez, one of the leaders of the People's Caucus, criticized the local's leadership for being too close to management and unwilling to enforce workers' rights.

''A union contract stands for something. If somebody's rights are violated, you stand up to it,'' he said, charging that Nummi's management and union leaders have chronically discouraged workers from filing grievances over safety and work-load issues.

Where does the truth lie? While it is impossible to assess immediately the legitimacy of all the attacks, clearly Nummi is not a totally happy place - as even Nummi executives acknowledge.

While some executives blame the formation of the People's Caucus on internal union politics, Kan Higashi, Nummi's president, said the rise of the faction was a matter of concern. ''It is a signal that we must notice and take care,'' he said. ''In that sense it is a big issue.''

Nevertheless, the majority of workers in the plant appear to have accepted the stresses of the system as a trade-off for relatively high-paying jobs. That is the portrait that emerged from several days at the plant and interviews with dozens of workers and managers.

If workers are not totally happy, that is not to say there is a broad-based rebellion brewing. Indeed, workers made it clear that they had more faith in the Nummi management, and the Nummi system than G.M.'s. Nummi management's efforts to abide by its promise not to lay off workers have gone a long way toward deepening that trust.

When slumping sales of the Chevrolet Nova, the car that Nummi then made for G.M., forced Nummi last year to reduce the production of the model to 650 cars a day from 910, there were no layoffs. Instead, workers were taken 100 at a time from the slowed assembly line and sent for training in problem solving and interpersonal relationships at full pay. Others helped prepare another assembly line for the new models.

''With G.M., if the line slowed down, some of us would have been on the street,'' said Ernestine A. Chavez, an assembly-line worker. Thankful but Fearful

Nummi is a place where workers are thankful for their $15-an-hour jobs - but live in constant fear of losing them. For many, the memories are still vivid of the low-paying jobs or unemployment they endured after G.M. shut the plant in 1982. That fear is what seems to motivate workers. There is no profit-sharing plan. And while rewards are given out for specific suggestions that improve efficiency, there is no system to share the financial gains of higher productivity with the work force as a whole.

''I can't honestly say I like it better'' than when it was a G.M. plant, ''but I'm working and that's better,'' Jackie Romero, an assembly-line worker who installs trim, said, echoing a common sentiment.

Heightening worker fears about losing their jobs is the fact that they do not have the safety net that hangs below Auto Workers members covered by national contracts with General Motors, Ford and Chrysler: supplemental unemployment pay that when added to state unemployment benefits allows laid-off workers to collect 95 percent of their usual pay.

One of the highest compliments that workers pay to Nummi is that it is now a ''fair'' place, where the workload is evenly distributed - unlike the G.M. days when some worked hard while those in ''good'' jobs coasted. But what that also means, workers are quick to add, is everyone now works hard all the time: ''getting ahead of yourself'' so you can take a breather is frowned upon, and there are fewer less-demanding jobs for older workers.

''It was worse with G.M.'' because ''some people worked hard, some not at all,'' said Jose Cordero, a 51-year-old worker who installs trim. But ''a lot of us are older'' and the work demands are ''harder for us,'' he added. ''I'm not as good as I was when I was younger.'' Four Times, You're Out

And there are other policies that even management acknowledges are tough - like Nummi's absence policy. A worker who is absent for any reason on three occasions in a 90-day period - with two consecutive days, for instance, counting as one occasion - is charged with ''an offense.'' And anyone committing four offenses in a year is fired.

Even the plant's vice president for human resources, Donald W. Childs, concedes that a person can be charged with an offense due to an unexpected illness. ''If it's cold and flu season, you had better think twice about taking a day off to get your hair done,'' he said.

Calling the policy ''inhumane,'' Richard Aguilar, a leader of the People's Caucus, said: ''You have to schedule your illnesses in advance.''

But if many Nummi workers are not wholly content with their lot, most seem resigned to it, believing that Nummi's exacting conditions are necessary to survive against intensifying competition from overseas.

''We have to compete with countries where they pay less wages,'' said Robert Mendoza, the leader of a worker team that installs fenders. ''The auto worker is a dying breed in this country.'' At least the conditions at Nummi are better than at Korean auto plants, added Richard Huth, a team leader in general maintenance. ''In Korea, they don't even bother to heat the plants,'' he said.

Indeed, if conditions at Nummi are tougher than at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, many Nummi workers still seem to think they are better off where they are. More precisely, the workers seem to believe that the Nummi model offers a better chance for survival than the traditional adversarial relationship between labor and management.

That was the finding of John Krafcik, a one-time quality-control engineer at Nummi who is now associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has studied dozens of plants as part of a research project on the auto industry. When he asked Nummi workers whether they would switch jobs if there was a G.M. plant across the street, the response was uniformly no, he said.

That feeling goes a long way toward explaining why the workers, most of whom are former G.M. employees, have twice ratified contracts that embrace Toyota's highly disciplined labor practices.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

''This plant is our survival,'' said George Nano, chairman of the union's bargaining committee at Nummi. ''Most of these people have no skills except as assemblers. Where are they going to get $15-an-hour jobs?''

The Nummi plant is something of a dinosaur in the southeast corner of San Francisco Bay. Most other heavy manufacturing operations have closed in recent years, and the small electronics firms spreading into the area from nearby Silicon Valley have little use for ex-auto workers.

Even leaders of the People's Caucus say they do not want to return to the conditions that existed when G.M. ran the plant. ''It's a good concept basically,'' said Mr. Fernandez. ''They should just live up to it.''

The fear of Japan, Korea and other productive or low-wage nations is not limited to Nummi's workers. It pervades the entire auto industry.

This may be why U.A.W. leaders have painted such a rosy picture of Nummi: they believe that unless workers at other factories embrace a similar system - and workers have been far from willing - those plants will be doomed. In addition, with the Japanese building several new plants in the United States, the union's leaders are eager to demonstrate to them that a work force comprised of their members can compete with any workers in the world.

''The big picture is that the industry has to compete with auto industries around the world, and you can't do it the old way,'' Mr. Krafcik said. ''Nummi means a lot: it shows we can compete.'' Nummi is half again as productive as plants operated by General Motors, assembling a car with 20 hours of labor rather than the 28 typical of a comparable G.M. plant. The cars produced at Nummi consistently rank the highest in G.M.'s quality audits and absenteeism is unusually low. Nummi has an unexcused absence rate of under 2 percent, compared with an average of nearly 9 percent at G.M. and close to 20 percent at the plant when G.M. ran it.

Some experts caution against attributing all of Nummi's success to its labor relations. They note that Toyota chose as the plant's first product a subcompact car that had been designed for ease of assembly from the outset and had been thoroughly de-bugged in Japan.

''I remember workers telling me that the cars practically put themselves together,'' Mr. Krafcik said of the model, which General Motors sold as the Nova and Toyota sold as the Corolla FX. ''It was hard to get a door to fit poorly.'' (Nummi is now producing two models: a new Toyota Corolla and the Chevrolet Geo Prism.) In addition to picking an easy-to-make car, Toyota installed a production line that had largely been fine-tuned by previous use in Japan. ''This is a system that had a lot of advance planning for quality and productivity,'' said Harley Shaiken, a former auto worker who is a professor of work and technology at the University of California at San Diego. ''Just looking at labor relations gives a distorted picture of what's happening at Nummi.''

But labor relations have certainly played an important role in Nummi's success. When Toyota negotiated the joint venture with G.M. in 1983, Toyota appeared to be planting the seeds of Nummi's destruction by agreeing to hire the work force from the more that 5,000 laid off from the Fremont plant the previous year. The workers had a reputation for militance, poor attendance and alcohol and drug abuse.

Most Japanese plants in this country have been built in rural areas and hired only young, carefully screened workers. But Toyota managers were convinced that the egalitarian Japanese approach would work at unionized Fremont. Unlike American plants where managers are remote figures in suits and ties and enjoy special parking and dining privileges, senior executives and workers at Nummi wear the same uniforms, park in the same lots and eat in the same cafeterias.

Workers are grouped in teams of four to eight people with one member designated as team leader. The team leader, who is paid 50 cents an hour more than others, handles administrative duties, fills in for absent workers and helps those having trouble finishing their jobs on time.

On both sides of the assembly line, cords hang within easy reach. They are connected to a lighted panel, called an andon board, that shows the status of each operation. A 'Right and Obligation'

A worker who falls behind or cannot finish his operation has a ''right and obligation,'' Nummi managers say, to pull the cord to prevent defective cars from continuing down the line. When the cord is pulled, a chime sounds and a light flashes on the board.

Team leaders and group leaders - who would be foremen in a conventional plant - converge on the problem. If the cord is not pulled again in a minute or so, the line shuts down until the problem is fixed.

Nummi executives say the ability of ordinary workers to stop the line symbolizes the relationship of trust between management and labor. ''We had heavy arguments about installing the andon cord here,'' said Mr. Higashi, Nummi's president. ''We wondered if workers would pull it just to get a rest. That has not happened.''

Some workers say they are pressured by group and team leaders to finish their jobs more quickly to avoid pulling the cord. But in a recent bulletin, local union leaders reminded workers that ''you have a right to stop the production line in accordance with Article XXVIII of the Agreement, without being subject to discipline.'' And during a recent visit, workers pulled the cords several times and stoppages were frequent.

If one team is constantly pulling the andon cord, some of their work may be shifted to another team or more labor may be added. Plagued with start-up problems with the new car models, the company recently agreed to hire 30 more workers.

One big issue at Nummi is the pace of work. There is little doubt that management pushes to get the most out of the workers. ''If a car is in a station for 62 seconds, we expect our people to be working for 62 seconds or as close to it as we can get,'' said Michael Mulleague, manager of assembly operations.

But the system also rotates workers through all the jobs a team must perform, so the workload is balanced and tedium is minimized.

Nummi managers also have gone to considerable effort to make jobs easier to perform. A visitor touring the plant sees one little touch after another that eliminates bending, stretching or heavy lifting. Heavy welding guns are suspended overhead and the line rises and falls so that most operations are performed at a comfortable height.

Nummi workers get involved in designing their own jobs in collaboration with their team and their group leaders. At most companies, industrial engineers tell workers how to do a job.

But since management decides how much work each team is assigned, the control given workers is limited. They are also expected to constantly refine their methods to save time. Solving Problems Fast

Part of the problem in interpreting events at Nummi, Mr. Higashi said, is that it does not fit into a conventional labor-management framework. In most unionized plants in the United States, if a workers has a complaint he meets with a local union representative. If the representative feels the complaint is justified he files a formal grievance with the company that may take months or years to resolve.

At Nummi, the emphasis is on solving problems quickly and at the lowest possible level. So if a worker calls a union representative, the union official is likely to arrive with a member of the company's labor relations staff. The three will try to work out the problems on the spot, eliminating the need for a grievance.

To critics of the Nummi system, this approach compromises the workers' right to file a grievance. To managers, it is simply a pragmatic response to changed conditions.

''We are unique in this country and have no guide maps for labor-management relations,'' Mr. Higashi said.

Whether Nummi is a model for industrial America is less important to Nummi's workers than a steady paycheck. Jesse Palomino, who helps run the attendance program in the plant, expressed what appears to be the majority view when he said: ''We got a second chance here, and we are trying to take advantage of it. Many people don't get a second chance.''

A version of this article appears in print on January 29, 1989, on Page 3003001 of the National edition with the headline: No Utopia, but to Workers It's a Job. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe